“I’m awfully glad I escaped it,” said a youth in front of Matt. “I got there five minutes late, and the man wouldn’t let me in. At least he said, ‘I’m not supposed to let you in after nine-fifteen.’ But I didn’t take the tip—or give it.”
In the middle of the address on Art, Gurney, coming up the staircase in the wake of a student friend (to whom he had been descanting on the absurdities of Cornpepperism, from which he had now revolted), perceived Herbert, and pushed him boisterously into the room, which straightway became a pandemonium; the pianist banging “See, the Conquering Hero Comes,” the boys stamping, singing, huzzahing, rattling their glasses, and shouting, “Cigars!” “Drinks!” “Strang!”
Herbert beamingly ordered boxes of Havanas and “soda-and-whiskies,” and soon Matt, still in his overcoat, found himself drinking and smoking and shouting with the rest, exalted by the whiskey into forgetfulness of his clothes and his fortunes, and partaking in all the rollicking humors of the evening, in all the devil-may-care gayety of the eternal undergraduate, roaring with his boon companions over the improper stories of the ascetic-looking young man with the poetic head, bawling street choruses, dancing madly in grotesque congested waltzes, wherein he had the felicity to secure Cornpepper for a partner, and distinguishing himself in the high-kicking pas seul, not departing till the final “Auld Lang Syne” had been sung with joined hands in a wildly whirling ring. Herbert had left some time before.
“Good-night, Matt; I want to get away. I don’t often get such an excuse for being out late. There’s no need for you to go yet, you lucky beggar,” he whispered, confidentially, as he sallied forth, radiantly sober, weaving joyous dreams of his travelling studentship future.
When the party broke up in the small hours, Matt Strang, saturated with whiskey and empty of victual, staggered along the frosty pavements, singing to the stars, that reeled round, blinking and winking like the buttons on Herbert’s boots.
CHAPTER IX
DEFEAT
His own boots preoccupied Matt’s attention ere the New Year dawned. Had “Four-toes” continued going to Grainger’s, instead of letting his subscription lapse perforce with the Christmas quarter, he might have convinced the class that his toes were normal, for they had begun to peep out despite all his efforts to botch up the seams. The state of his wardrobe prevented him from looking up Herbert at his club, especially as he was doubtful whether the travelling studentship had not already carried his cousin off; and thus that mad night, which was a hot shame to sober memory, grew to seem an unreal nightmare, and Herbert as distant as ever.
A vagrant atom of the scum of the city, he tasted all the bitterness of a million-peopled solitude. His quest for work was the more hopeless the shabbier his appearance grew. In optimistic after-dinner moods he had thought the spectacle of the streets sufficient, and to feast one’s eyes on the pageant of life a cloyless ecstasy; and, indeed, in the first days of his wanderings, the merest artistic touch in the wintry streets could still give him a pleasurable sensation that was a temporary anodyne—the yellow sand scattered on slippery days along the tram lines, and showing like a spilth of summer sunshine; the warm front of a public-house, making the only spot of color in the long suburban street; strange faces seen for an instant in fog and lost forever; snow-flakes tumbling over one another in their haste, or fluttering lingeringly to earth; red suns, gray-ringed, like school-boys’ taws—but, as the slow days unfolded their sordid unchanging coils, he found himself shrinking more and more into himself. He sought warmth and refuge from reality in the National Gallery or the British Museum, dreaming away the hours before the more imaginative pictures or the Elgin marbles. But even these failed him at last, their beauty an intolerable irony. Sometimes he realized with a miserable start the real tragedy of being “out of work,” how it narrowed the horizon down to the prospect of meals, so that the great movement of the world from which he was shut out left him equally exclusive, and the announcements on the newspaper posters—wars and international football and the opening of parks and new plays and the deaths of great men and the rise of ministries—struck no responsive chord in his imagination, were all shadowy emanations from some unreal mockery of a universe. The real universe had his own navel for centre. Sometimes a faint perception of the humor of the position distorted his lips in a melancholy smile; he wondered how he would come out under Jimmy Raven’s pencil. At other times he lay huddled up in his bed, his fading clothes heaped over the one blanket, passing the day in an apathetic trance, interrupted only by the intermittent working of his imagination, or by observation of optical effects that accidentally arrested his gaze; and the next day, in remorse for lost possibilities, he would rise before dawn, and recommence his search for employment.
From such a long day’s tramp he was shuffling homeward late one dark, dismal night, when, pausing to warm his feet and hands at the cellar-grating of a baker’s shop, he was accosted by William Gregson, striding along with a frown on his forehead and a brown-paper parcel in his hand.
“Hullo, Fourt—Strang!” he cried, pausing. “Don’t see you any more.”